Often when handing over a site to a client, there’s a lot of documentation and explanation that goes along with it – normally face-to-face or via email, which can sometimes be forgotten or lost.

Save yourself the trouble of explaining it all over again to your client by making a splash page containing your instructions, that will be loaded when they login to Textpattern.

1. Download and install this plugin.
2. Go to Admin > Plugins and click the ‘Edit’ link for esq_adminsplash.
3. The 5 config options you can change are in an array format – make sure you keep an eye on quotes and commas:
   • tab_name – Name of the second-level tab for your splash page (will be under the Extensions tab).
   • page_title – Will form part of the document title (e.g. Txp > Your Site > Textpattern Admin Help).
   • content_width – Set a pixel or percent size for the splash page to be.
   • content_textiled – Set either true or false depending if you want your splash page content to be treated at Textile. If you set this to false you will have to mark-up the content using HTML.
   • content – This is the actual content of your splash page – use Textile if you have set the option above to true, otherwise use HTML. Please be careful with the <<<EOF and EOF code which is wrapped around the content – even one character change to these lines can cause trouble.
4. Go to Admin > Preferences > Advanced and set ‘Default admin tab’ to ‘Admin Help’ (or whatever you set tab_name to in the config).
5. Logout and log back in again – you should see your newly created splash page!

Some things to note:

• Even users without access to the Extensions tab (normally only users with Publisher or Managing Editor privileges will be able to access this tab) will still be able to access the splash page – they will just not be able to see the tab.
• If something goes wrong and when you log back in you see nothing (or you see errors), delete the esq_adminsplash plugin and start again. If you can’t see the admin links to access the Admin > Plugin page, go to yoursite.com/textpattern/index.php?event=plugin and you should be able to delete it.